Ladies and Gentlemen, Doubt Yourself: Exploration of Gender Differences in Confirmation Bias in a Human Reinforcement Learning Environment

Changing people’s behavior is sometimes of vital importance. However, it seems some people are not always willing to adapt, no matter how many valid reasons are provided. These observations may indicate the effect of a confirmation bias at play. This study aimed to research existence of confirmation bias in a reinforcement learning environment, while using gender as its main predictor to explore possible differences with the intent to better understand behavioral change resistance. The study had a 2 x 2 within-subjects design. 112 participants performed an instrumental learning task involving factual and counterfactual reinforcement learning, in part derived from a previous study by Palminteri et al. (2017). Following exclusion criteria, 99 participants were included for analysis (age = 25.29, SD = 13.27; 81.82% females). Contrary to expectations, statistical analysis showed no evidence of a non-zero mean confirmation bias in the population (Z = -1.260, p = .208, r = -.127)....Show moreChanging people’s behavior is sometimes of vital importance. However, it seems some people are not always willing to adapt, no matter how many valid reasons are provided. These observations may indicate the effect of a confirmation bias at play. This study aimed to research existence of confirmation bias in a reinforcement learning environment, while using gender as its main predictor to explore possible differences with the intent to better understand behavioral change resistance. The study had a 2 x 2 within-subjects design. 112 participants performed an instrumental learning task involving factual and counterfactual reinforcement learning, in part derived from a previous study by Palminteri et al. (2017). Following exclusion criteria, 99 participants were included for analysis (age = 25.29, SD = 13.27; 81.82% females). Contrary to expectations, statistical analysis showed no evidence of a non-zero mean confirmation bias in the population (Z = -1.260, p = .208, r = -.127). Additionally, no relation was found between the ability to adapt and confirmation bias (rs(97) = .197, p = .051), strengthening the previous finding. A difference in confirmation bias between men and women could not be supported by this study (U = 717, p = .913, r = -.01). Though these results were unexpected, they exposed opportunities to improve confirmation bias testing by controlling for autocorrelation of choice, metacognition and mental states. Finally, though results may have been influenced by effects from the current COVID-19 pandemic, it also provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study these effects by replicating this study afterwards.Show less

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Ladies and Gentlemen, Doubt Yourself: Exploration of Gender Differences in Confirmation Bias in a Human Reinforcement Learning Environment